OpenAI Takes Its Mask Off

There's a story about Sam Altman that has been repeated often enough to become Silicon Valley lore. In 2012, Paul Graham, a co-founder of the famed start-up accelerator Y Combinator and one of Altman's biggest mentors, sat Altman down and asked if he wanted to take over the organization. The decision was a peculiar one: Altman was only in his late 20s, and at least on paper, his qualifications were middling. He had dropped out of Stanford to found a company that ultimately hadn't panned out. After seven years, he'd sold it for roughly the same amount that his investors had put in.